When life gives you apples…you make…applesauce! Lulu’s apple tree produced a lot of good (and yes, a few bad) apples this year. While I would have liked to make 10 batches of apple cobbler, I felt like applesauce was a little more practical and healthy. Plus, I had never made homemade applesauce before, and it’s a pretty dang easy, wing-it recipe. From scratch applesauce is also about 130912830912 times better than anything you would buy at the store. I don’t care how cute those little squeeze tubes are!

Applesauce is a breeze to make if you have some sort of apple peeler or spiralizer. Our apple peeler did all the dirty work for us, and pretty much made it so we didn’t even have to puree the applesauce when it was done cooking. They were sliced so thin they pretty much melted right into applesauce!

And seriously, we really winged it on this recipe. As you can see we left some of the skin on, which is no biggie for us but some people would probably gasp at the atrocity of it all! When you are making your own applesauce, do what you want! Despite leaving some skins on and some cloves floating around in the batch, things turned out pretty spectacular:

I remember as a kid, I HATED applesauce. What was wrong with me? My poor mother. Applesauce is the perfect snack, and it can be incorporated into so many things (Pork Chops, pancakes, breads, muffins, stirred into yogurt)….and homemade is the only way to go!

Recipe
Homemade Applesauceby Lauren and Lulumakes about 12 servings

Ingredients

6 lbs apples (I used homegrown red apples, but you can use a mix of green and red, whatever you have)

1 cup apple juice, apple cider, or water (for this batch I used water, if you use juice you will need to adjust sugar accordingly)

juice of 1 lemon

2 cinnamon sticks

1 tbsp cloves

1/2 cup brown sugar, to taste

1/2 cup white sugar, to taste

1/2 tbsp pumpkin pie spice

Directions

Wash, peel, and core apples. Cut apples into thin slices. We used an apple peeler, you can also use a spiralizer, mandoline, or do it by hand (this took care of all of the hard work for us). Discard the core and add thinly sliced pieces of the apples to a large pot.

Add water (or juice), lemon juice, cinnamon sticks and cloves to the pot and cook over medium heat, covered and stirring occasionally, for about 25 minutes. Taste, and add some sugar. We started off with 1/2 cup brown sugar and then added about 1/2 cup of white sugar. Add a little at a time until it suits your taste. Feel free to add more spices, such as pumpkin pie spice, allspice, or nutmeg. Discard cinnamon stick and any cloves floating around. We are pretty lazy and just like to keep them in the sauce, so we can let more flavor get infused the longer it’s in the fridge. You don’t have to be weird like us.

Our apples were very thinly sliced and cooked down to a perfect sauce, but if it’s a little too chunky for your taste feel free to add your applesauce to a food processor to smooth it out. You can serve the applesauce right away warm, or store it in the fridge or freezer (fridge for at least a week, freezer for a lot longer)!

2016 Version:

Adapted from above:

Ingredients

6 lbs homegrown red apples, peeled and cored

1 cup pear juice

juice of 1 lemon

1 cinnamon stick

1 tsp ground cloves

1/2 cup brown sugar

Directions

Add all ingredients to a large pot and cook over medium heat, covered, for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste apple sauce and add brown sugar, adjusting the amount for the sweetness you like (you may need more of less depending on the sweetness of your apples). Stir in sugar and cook for another 5 minutes or so. Turn off the heat, stir again, and either leave apple sauce chunky or puree with an immersion blender or add apple sauce in batches to a blender or Cuisinart.